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It’s a New Month, and You Know What That Means

There were some great discussions last month about technical support and customer service, and now it’s time to see whose comment was the chosen one for July!

This month the lucky blog contest winner is Bill Griffin, who commented on the post Support and Sunrocket Alternatives. Congratulations! I just sent you an email explaining how to get your prize. If you don’t receive it, reply to this post and let me know.

To everyone else, thanks so much for all the great comments, and be sure to keep ‘em coming, because next time it could be your chance to win!

8 thoughts on “It’s a New Month, and You Know What That Means”

All this about customer service is fine but as a customer of Ilium I’d personally much rather you spent less time blogging & more time working on getting an update to ListPro out. I have had this product for over 3 years without any significant product updates which in my opinion is pretty poor customer service.

Can I (very politely) disgree with Mitch Olsen (although as I’m not a user of ListPro I can’t share his pain either!)?

I’ve been a customer of Ilium (using eWallet) for a good number of years now. I have to say that in that time it has, in my experience, been one of the very few software companies (or, for that matter, hardware companies either) that’s been prepared to practice what it preaches when it comes to customer service.

I phoned them (from the U.K.) once, and over the years I’ve had 3 or 4 queries that have been dealt with via email. On each and every occasion the service I have received was exemplary (including the time where they could simply have told me to RTFM!). On Mitch’s specific point, upgrades to eWallet certainly seem to have come along at very appropriate intervals.

I spent a number of years working for the UK’s largest PC retailer. I never had any hesitation in recommending eWallet to customers for whom it was an appropriate solution, based on my experience of both the software and the Ilium’s standards of service. If only my employer could have taken the Ilium customer service manual and applied it across the organisation!

In summary then – keep up the good work. I enjoy your blog entries and I think the volume of them is about right. Long may they continue.

Thanks, Richard, and also thanks, Mitch, for your comments. I think it’s been slightly under 2 years since we last released a ListPro upgrade, but I agree that 3 years – or even 2 – is a long time to wait for a new version. There will be one soon. We’ve had a lot of direction changes over the last few years, and that’s what’s delayed ListPro, not the blogging. The developers never blog, it’s mostly me and Julie. When we’re not blogging we’re updating the site (Julie) and fighting with partners and breaking databases (me. I am a champion database breaker, if anyone needs any help).

Maybe Mitch is just anxious like me. Every morning, and I do mean every morning, I quickly come to this blog hoping to see something about Listpro Beta. I know these things take time, but I’m so anxious I can hardly stand it. With the quality we have seen from Ilium products, I know it will be great. Now I say this with a big smile: “Please Hurry!” Thanks for all your hard work in the past, present, and in the future.
Mark

This might be a good jumping off point then to talk about what directions you are planning to take ListPro and/or get some feedback from users on what feature sets they want. For example, how do most of us use ListPro (to kick-off a discussion)?

I have tried to use the program as a daily lister / reminder for stuff like recurring errands and workouts. It surprisingly isn’t all that intuitive to set up a recurring list that will prompt the user to check each item done, record that those tasks were done for that day and then reset itself for the next.

Maybe that functionality is there but I haven’t been able to set up such a list that will do so. Perhaps developing wizards to make the creation easier or offering the ability to integrate user lists with Pocket Informant and other scheduling programs so that they can become part of our daily routines.

Another aspect of the program is that a lot of us use it as a basic database app. I’d really appreciate wizards to set up database lists (for book, DVD, collections, etc.) and the ability to export or import those lists in CSV or Excel formats.

I really haven’t made as much use of the program as I had planned because it is not all that easy to use and it doesn’t offer alarms or integration with my PIM. Again, maybe a lot of this kind of functionality is already there but I just don’t know about it.

A lot of my use of ListPro is as a note taker/task noter for projects I am working on. During the design stage of a project I am using it to take down notes about the features/functions of what I am building. I’d personally like to see ListPro include some Evernote-type functionality even if this was as simple as more flexibility over the layout of the list view & detail view.

As some of you may remember I’m the Product Manager here at Ilium Software. I hear you regarding waiting for a new version. As Ellen said, it isn’t that we have forgotten about ListPro. Rather, we’ve had a number of really exciting things going on here that have taken up a lot of time…and to clarify, these are “things” that we really believe will offer some amazingly cool benefits to you guys in the future.

That said, ListPro 5.0 is currently in final beta and will go live very soon. We didn’t post on the blog for testers because right now we’ve got a strong group in place (although if you’re interested drop us an email and we’ll keep you in mind!)

One specific though…ALARMS!

Actually ListPro does have alarms in it Ron. I’m very sorry you may not have known about them. This points out one problem we’ve had…people not being able to find the features! One of the things we’ve done in 5.0 is to include a “ListPro Companion”, a tool that gives step-by-step instructions for all of ListPro’s primary functions. Hopefully this will help to bring some of these features to the front!

And Ron…if you have any trouble at all getting alarms to work, drop our support folks a line! They’ll help you to get things working!